Vampiress TV Review: "What We Do in the Shadows"

The Gist: Based on the movie of the same title the series much in the same light as the show "The Office" follows a first person documentary/ reality tv format.  In it a film crew documents the everyday lives of a group of four vampires living together in Staten Island with them talking to the crew about the everyday happenings in their lives. Three of the tenants are old world vampires while the fourth is an energy vampire who feeds by sucking the energy out of rooms through boring stories and ruining fun.  The three blood drinking vampires try to avoid him as much as possible.

Female Vampire Factor:

 The female of the house is Nadja (Natasia Demetriou)

As the series goes on Nadja sees and eventually turns a nerdy college girl named Jenna who becomes her fledgling.

Jenna even after becoming a vampire struggles socially.  Eventually we find out while Nadja is teaching her to seduce and feed that she has the vampire ability to become invisible.

Season 1 of the series includes several cameo's from famous actors and actresses playing vampires.  The first of which is former SNL actress Vanessa Bayer who plays an emotion vampire name Evie in the episode "Werewolf Feud"

An emotional vampire is someone who feeds off of sympathy from others.  She ends up working in the same office as the energy vampire Colin Robinson.  They start out in competition feeding off of their co-workers by making them miserable (him with his long boring stories and her announcing a new crisis in her life every day to the office) but eventually join forces and even develop a short lived romance.

Season 1: Episode 7 "The Trial" includes a ton of vampire cameos.

 In this episode one of the head vampires comes to stay with the clan in their long island home.  Eventually they teach him to ditch his old ways and he starts to enjoy life in the modern new world.  Eventually he gets too comfortable even being up during daylight hours when the vampires familiar opens the door to the home at the wrong time exposing him to daylight instantly killing him.  This leads to the roommates being put on trial by an all star vampire counsel.  The one who leads them to the trial is played by a vamped out Kristin Schaal.

The council of vampires is pretty much a who's who of people who have played vampires in film and television.  This includes the three original stars of the film adaptation as well as Danny Trejo (From Dusk Till Dawn), Paul Ruebens (Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie) & Wesley Snipes (Blade) (Dave Bautista also make a cameo in this episode as a vampire inmate waiting for his trial).  As far as the females of the counsel we have Evan Rachel Wood (True Blood).

 and the leader is Tilda Swinton (No Lovers Left Alive)

The running gag in this case not being that they're playing their characters from their films but instead that they weren't acting in their movies and the actors themselves are vampires as they are all playing themselves.